TargetProcess Product Blog

Quite often we’re asked questions on how to align TargetProcess agile framework with down-to-earth life — like expenses forecast, sum of efforts based on resource usage for each particular activity, the total cost of the project. These items sound more MS Project like (check what we think of MS Project) but we give credit to the real business needs and in this post we’ll share a technique to get those reports and calculations.

Suppose, you’re planning a project. You need to calculate the efforts and costs for QA, implementation, deployment to production, post production support etc. Each user story has all these stages, but they intertwine without following each other linearly (read more on the benefits of feature-based development vs. stage-based development )

To track these activities/stages across an iteration or a release, you can create tasks within a user story, like here:

You can create custom report that will calculate total time for Specification, Development, Testing, Test Cases across iteration. Here’s how:

And here’s the report:

Time reports can be used for cost calculations based on an hourly rate.

You’re welcome to comment and contact us with questions about your particular custom reporting case.

How much time we spent on a particular release? Quite interesting question that can be answered using Custom Reports functionality. For example, last release of TargetProcess v.2.12 took about 5,500 hours. That is MUCH more than any of the previous releases. OK, let’s try to create the report.

Step 1

Navigate to Custom Reports and click Create New report button. Select Release entity.

Step 2

Add Start Date and End Date fields to the report in Fields tab.

Step 3

Click to Summary Fields tab and specify new summary field as shown on the picture below

Step 4

Click Settings tab, specify report name and Run it.

Report Engine in TargetProcess is quite interesting beast. It allows you to extract data in different ways. For example, you may to create stories quality report that shows number of total bugs, open bugs, failed and passed test cases for each user story. Let’s try to create the report in TargetProcess v.2.12.

First click to Custom Reports link on the top and then push New Report button. You will see a report wizard. Select user story entity, then click Fields tab. On this step you should select required columns for the report.

Then we need to configure Summary Columns as shown on the image below:

To apply new filter to summary column, click Filter button. In the popup window specify required filter parameters.

Click Settings tab, specify report name and push Run and Save button. And here is the final report:

We’ve completed Iteration #12.4 and added some really nice features into Report Engine. It is possible to add summary columns, group entities and add simple charts. Here are some examples of real reports (they are working)

We will add some fancy functions during next two weeks and most likely v.2.7 with Report Engine will be released in the middle of December. So far you may play with Report Engine at http://preview.targetprocess.com (admin / admin).

Today we’ve completed third iteration of v.2.7. Report engine implementation going really well and right now it is possible to extract list of entities with

• defined columns (including related entities columns)
• set columns order
• defined filters (including related entities filters)

For example, you may extract all user stories with all columns like Name, Effort, Iteration Name, Feature Name where User Story Effort = 0 and User Story Feature Priority is Must Have.

It is required to add calculations to the reports engine as well as more flexible columns. In final release it will be possible to create let’s say a report like that

Development of Program Releases Management is in progress as well. In this iteration we’ve added product backlog to release plan with sorting and filtering options. There are some things to do in next iteration like drag and drop planning, release date forecasting and some smaller things.

Also we’ve integrated Selenium tests with Cruise Control and at least we have good build process setup :)